Posted by Greg Gottesman

All of us at Madrona are looking forward to welcoming TechStars for its big reunion event here in Seattle on November 4. TechStars is a mentorship-driven incubation program/seed investment fund with operations in Boulder, Colorado and Boston, Massachusetts. Every year, TechStars funds 10 very early technology start-ups in each city and provides an intensive boot camp for those companies, involving dozens of mentors from the start-up community.

TechStars has been operating for three years and has funded about 40 companies. Some alumni companies have already had positive exits, including IntenseDebate (acquired by Automattic/WordPress), Socialthing (AOL), and Brightkite. Every year the TechStars companies get together for a reunion in a different city, and this year the reunion is in our Emerald City.

As part of the reunion event, TechStars reserves a part of one afternoon to highlight its companies that are still raising money and has them pitch to investors. To date, about 75% of the companies that come out of TechStars have been angel- or venture-backed. The pitch session is a great opportunity to see a bunch of interesting early-stage companies. In addition to company presentations, there will be a panel on angel and venture investment trends that will include Brad Feld (co-founder of TechStars and Managing Director of The Foundry Group), Andy Sack (Founders Co-Op), Steve Hall (Vulcan Capital), David Cohen (co-founder of TechStars and angel investor), Chris Sheehan (CommonAngels in Boston), and yours truly. It should be a lively discussion, followed by the pitches.

If you’re a Seattle-area VC or angel investor, please contact me, and I’ll get you an invitation to the event. Hope to see you there!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 9:29 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous, VC Land. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.